How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee Read Online Free PDF Page B

assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BCE , by political enemies who preferred not having a dictator when all was said and done. The Roman biographer Suetonius provided a life of Julius Caesar in his Lives of the Caesars , published in 115 CE . According to Suetonius, already during his lifetime Caesar had declared that he had a divine heritage. In a funeral oration he delivered for his aunt he stated that one side of his family descended from the ancient Roman kings—through the legendary Marcus Ancius, the fourth king of Rome—and the other side descended from the gods. His family line, in fact, could be traced back to the goddess Venus.
    At Caesar’s death a vicious power struggle ensued between his enemies and supporters, the latter including Mark Antony (of Antony and Cleopatra fame) in league with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who later became Caesar Augustus. At Caesar’s funeral, Antony decided not to deliver the customary funerary oration. Instead, he had a herald cry out the Senate’s decision “to render Caesar all honors, both human and divine.” In effect, Julius Caesar was voted into divinity by the ruling authorities. This is a process known as deification —the recognition that, in this instance, a person had been so great that he had been taken up at death into the ranks of the gods. The “common people” and even the heavens seemed to support Caesar’s deification, as Suetonius tells us: “[Caesar] died in the fifty-sixth year of his life and was included in the ranks of the gods, not only by formal decree but also by the conviction of the common people. Indeed at the first games which were given after his deification by his heir Augustus, a comet shone, appearing around the eleventh hour for seven days in succession, and it was believed to be the soul of Caesar who had been received into heaven” ( The Deified Julius Caesar 88). 8
    Looking at the matter from a purely human and political point of view, there is little question about why the heir and adopted son Octavian wanted the Roman people to agree that Caesar was not only descended from a divine line, but had himself been made a divine being. If Julius Caesar was a god, what would that make his son? As New Testament scholar Michael Peppard has recently pointed out, to our knowledge only two people in the ancient world were actually called “Son of God.” Other people were, to be sure, named after their divine fathers: son of Zeus, son of Apollo, and so on. But only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.
Caesar Augustus
    Julius Caesar may have been considered a god after he died, but his adopted son Octavian (emperor from 27 BCE to 14 CE ) was sometimes considered a god while he was still alive. Considering a living ruler to be divine was not unheard of in the ancient world. The Egyptians had long revered their pharaohs as living representatives of deities, and the conqueror Alexander the Great, mentioned earlier, was offered and accepted the kind of obeisance reserved for the gods. But this was not done in the Roman world until the beginning of the worship of the emperor.
    Legends indicated that Octavian did not have a normal human birth but, like others before him, was born of the union of a mortal and a god. According to Suetonius, Octavian’s mother, Atia, was said to have been made pregnant by the god Apollo in the form of a snake (reminiscent, of course, of the conception of Alexander the Great). Atia had been attending the sacred rites of Apollo in a temple, and in the middle of the night, while she was asleep on her litter in the temple, a snake slid up to her and then quickly departed. When she awoke, she purified herself as she would have done after having sex with her husband, and